Strategies in the Animal Rights Movement

Good strategy is difficult to define. We can study strategy by example: looking at the past, finding the winners, and mapping out the steps to their inevitable victory. Yet this is wholly different from deciding how an action today will affect tomorrow given we are without the gift of hindsight. Strategists will attempt to extrapolate patterns from the past to find some set of rules to make future decisions, but ultimately, they do not know what the future will hold, how people will act, or what unseen variable(s) plays a part. How much luck is built into the system? How do you have a strategy for something that has never been done before? 

So when we look at strategies for animal liberation and world veganism, how can we set ourselves up for success when strategy so often appears to be the roll of dice? Given we have only a handful of wins in the animal rights world, what strategies should we be pushing forward?  Do we push for abolition or welfare? Educational vegan outreach or systematic changes? Do we work above ground in the government and regulatory agencies or under the cover of night like the Animal Liberation Front? Do disruptive protests hurt the movement or are they key to winning small battles to chip away at speciesism? 

I don’t know the answer to most of these questions (sorry to disappoint!). Still, I want to review various strategies organizations employ, explain their theory of change, and how they lead to justice for the animals. I endorse those strategies that include the most tactics and impact points. Impact points are areas that could be affected by a given strategy. The ultimate goal for a particular action could be Z, but along the way, you could be impacting A, B, and C. This multi-faceted approach allows us to roll the dice more often leading to more chances of positive impact even if we miss our ultimate goal. 

For definitions, note that strategy and tactics are different. A strategy contains a diagnosis of the current state of the situation, a plan of action, and the goal state. Various tactics are employed in our actions to achieve the goal where the outcome is different from the current state. Tactics are the actions we take for a strategy to reach its intended goal.

This is a huge topic, and I can only barely scratch the surface here. We also have to understand the sacrifices people are willing to make. Commitment to getting felony charges requires much more than standing on a street corner talking to passersby. Even being naked for the animals might be for a select few. As much as we might want everyone to be deeply committed, revolutionary activists, this likely not going to happen. We can only encourage and inspire others in areas they are willing to give.

A Cube of Truth (cube) is when activists hold monitors in public showing footage of factory farm conditions and slaughterhouses. While gruesome, the public is largely unaware of the specific norms in the animal agriculture industry. This shows everyday citizens what happens behind the windowless sheds. The industry does not want this footage shown which is why filming is illegal in some states.

The strategy here is education. Educate enough people, get them to reduce their consumption of animal products or go vegan, and eventually, we win. 

I’m not inclined to call education a strategy even though some people focused solely on vegan outreach and groups like Anonymous for the Voiceless or We The Free would. Education should be used as a tactic. Our impact point with cubes is talking to people in hopes they make lifestyle changes. There are marginal leadership, organization, and public speaking benefits to running a cube, but all these come with more forms of activism. 

Simple Heart is led by Wayne Hsiung who has taken part in numerous open rescues and encourages a mass movement of open rescues. An open rescue is when activists go into a farm or slaughterhouse to rescue animals on film with their faces not covered. This approach is akin to smashing a car window on a hot day to save a dog dying of heat. Wayne and others have captured multiple felony charges, most of which get dropped right before trial. However, the goal behind open rescues is to get companies in court to defend their practices. The public will not be on the side of the animal ag industry, hence why so many changes are dropped.

This strategy is so powerful that the Harvard Review published a piece defending the practice of open rescue. 

Impact points are numerous: press, media, talking to friends and family about personal experiences inside the facilities, and court cases that lead to precedences for future court cases. Each of these impact points has the power to change individuals similar to a cube, but Simple Heart is adding on systematic changes by trying to change the law. From the rescue stories, media coverage, and court cases, each step has the power to cause change. 

Systematic level changes have the power to force others to change. For example, it does not matter what your views are on slavery because you cannot own a person in the United States. We could ask and pressure companies to remove asbestos from insulation or lead from paint or ban those products entirely. We could ask consumers to not buy eggs from caged hens or pressure corporations to enact cage-free policies. Similarly with fur, foie gras, down, etc. Policies and legislation have a far-reaching impact affecting many individuals while consumer demand-driven initiatives like educational outreach seek to change individuals one by one. Individual changes can create a base market demand for boycotting a particular product. This can aid as a foundation and example for policy changes, for it would make no sense to ban something everyone fully supports.

The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is a large subject with many books written about their history. They are a clandestine group of individuals taking part in often illegal activity under the darkness of night. Some members of the ALF take part in rescues taking individuals directly from factory farms, only they cover their faces and do not expose themselves. They do not want to be caught. Being caught could mean prison. And if you are in prison, you cannot be helping animals. 

The strategy here is direct sabotage against an industry or farm causing economic damage with the bonus of saving some individuals. Spray painting inside an industrial shed you have visited puts fear into animal farmers causing them to waste money on security. In the case of fur farms, mink are released and go directly into the wild by the thousands causing the farms to close down immediately. 

Such tactics make some feel uneasy due to the illegal activity and suggest we need to stay above ground playing by the rules of the law. Those in the ALF however see it from the opposite direction. Above ground, legal activities are too slow and sometimes fail. Burning down a vivisection lab has immediate benefits for the animals. 

I have written about the power of farm animal sanctuaries. In summary, effective sanctuaries provide homes for animals, vegan outreach, and community. Sanctuaries can support individuals rescued from open or ALF rescues adding to all the impact points of open rescue and the ALF. 

The impact points are additionally as large as the organization can make them. Farm Sanctuary has worked with numerous policy initiatives. Rowdy Girl Rescue supports animal farmers wanting to transition to plant farming. Press, interviews, art, education, community support, and more are all impact points. Allowing school trips or volunteer hours to be made at a sanctuary is an excellent way to talk about animal agriculture to kids who may not be exposed to this information. 

Some of these impact points can be achieved at organizations other than sanctuaries, but sanctuaries have the added benefit of meeting the individuals most impacted by animal agriculture: the animals. The animals are a multiplier of what we do and why we do it.

When polled, most of the public is against factory farming, but then when asked if they would go vegan, they say “no”. Personal change is hard unless the individual is sufficiently committed to the cause. Ballot initiatives try to tap into the public’s disgust of factory farming while not telling them to change their diet. If enough of these broad, systematic changes happen, people will naturally find themselves without animal products having not done anything other than vote.

In 2024, two such major initiatives are happening. Pro-Animal Future in Denver, Colorado has two ball initiatives. Measure 308 will ban the sale of new fur products in Denver, and Measure 309 will phase out slaughterhouses in Denver. In Sonoma County California, End Factory Farming in SoCo is supporting an initiative to ban factory farms in the county. This impacts 21 factory farms. Should one pass, the slaughterhouse and factory farm ban could set up momentum for other cities to propose similar bans. Once the world sees something is possible, it is no longer impossible. Once the mental hurdle is removed, the goal is easier to achieve.

The impact points are everywhere because the tactics employed are numerous: door knocking, phone calls, texting, postcards, holding large banners over a highway, news segments, coordination, and partnership with other organizations and companies in the area, benefit events, op-ed and opinion pieces, and more. Each of these educates individuals on the horrors of animal agriculture while supporting systematic changes.

Ballot initiatives along with any other strategy that directly challenges the industry will also cost the industry time and money. Hiring lawyers to fight against open rescues or having to pay for ads to get people to not vote for the bans is a tax on the industry that we should welcome. Animal agriculture exists in its current form due to government subsidies because the industry makes so little profit, so any additional cost to their system is a win on its own. 

Henry Spira’s pressure campaign to stop the study of the sexual preferences of mutilated cats and the makeup industry testing makeup on animals, SHAC attempting to stop one of the largest vivisecting companies, recent foie gras campaigns by Animal Activism Mentorship, and fur campaigns by CATF, all show pressure campaigns have a history of wins. 

Pressure campaigns focus on building an animal liberation movement through winnable campaigns targeting some particular aspect of a company that is easy for the public to get behind. Pressure campaigns need the public’s support on the issues they are protesting against. Using public sentiment, activists expose a company doing what most people are against as pressure for change. For example, most of the public is against foie gras, so targeting restaurants with highly focused messaging and pressure around foie gras causes them to drop the diseased, fattened duck liver.

While outreach to the public can happen, such as educating the public on how foie gras is produced, pressure campaigns do not target individuals. They want companies to change by taking the demand to their front door (both literally and figuratively). The impact points are immediately decreasing the demand for animal exploitation and movement building. 

One by one, companies selling fur and designers signing a fur-free policy will eradicate the fur industry. No need for individuals to change. No need for legislation (though most would support following up with legislation to keep fur from ever coming back). Through constant and consistent pressure across animal enterprises, pressure campaigns remove them.

These small wins grow over time, allowing activists to understand the tactics to set their sights on larger targets. This is movement building, and movement building alone is an important component for our ultimate goal. We all need community, and a community built on winning is all the better.

These are only a handful of strategies to consider and the amazing organizations that use them. There are more such as enshrining into law rights for non-human animals by the Non-Human Animal Rights Project, unleashing a torrent of lawsuits against animal abusers by the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Humane Society Of the United States, and PETA, or making meat absolutely by growing meat not from animals by the Good Food Institute. Each has a role in normalizing the concept that exploiting animals is wrong. 

A great way to judge effective strategies is to consider what the animal agriculture industry is afraid of. Animal Agriculture Alliance publishes annual articles around strategies and organizations they most fear. This is a blessing to activists since it tells us exactly what we should focus on.

Which strategy is the best? Which will have the greatest impact? While many passionate activists lay out their reasons for a particular strategy, it remains to be seen which one(s) will free the animals of their neverending cycle of abuse by humans. The general advice I hear is that for anyone wanting to be involved, involve yourself in whatever you are best at and most interested in. If you hate street outreach but love editing videos, do that. Maybe you can excel at being an undercover investigator while others thrive at fundraising. Whatever you choose, do it and do it now to the maximum of your ability. The animals cannot wait.